Dark Tides Read online

  She could see him shift on his feet and look awkward. “I have a particular interest in the boy… in the twins.”

  “But Roberto is their uncle? Then my baby must be their cousin?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So you must love my boy too,” she insisted. “Let me show him to you.”

  “Perhaps I should go now and come back this afternoon?” he suggested, but she had already opened the parlor door and called out before he could speak, and then the nursemaid came from the kitchen with the baby in her arms.

  Quickly Livia took the baby from the nursemaid and turned to James with her cheek against the little dark head. The baby was awake, and as she held him out to James, he fixed the man’s face with a dark blue wondering gaze.

  “Is he not beautiful?” she demanded, her hands still on him as she put him into James’s arms, so they held him together.

  “Yes,” James said truly, struck with tenderness at the thought of this child, another child, growing up fatherless in this poor little house.

  “See, how he likes you,” she remarked, moving away so that James held the baby on his own, and felt his grip tighten with anxiety.

  “I have no experience of babies,” he said, holding him for only a moment and then trying to hand him back to her. “I don’t know how to manage them. I don’t know what they… prefer.”

  She laughed at that, but she took the child and held him against her shoulder, turning sideways so that James could see the exquisite baby face against the darkness of his mother’s glossy hair and her profile, as clear-cut as a cameo. “Ah, you would learn in no time,” she assured him. “You would be a wonderful father. I know you would be. Every man should raise his son. It is his legacy. How else can he leave a name in the world?”

  The door opened behind her and Alys stood in the doorway. She looked in silence from her sister-in-law to James and back again. James flushed with embarrassment.

  “My mother will see you this afternoon,” Alys said icily to James. “Not now. Lady da Ricci was telling you to leave now.”

  “Indeed yes,” the lady said, her dark eyes wide. “Forgive me, I was distracted.”

  James bowed. “At what time shall I come?” he asked, picking up his hat and riding whip.

  “At four?” Livia suggested brightly. “And stay for dinner?”

  “At three,” Alys ruled. “For an hour.”

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned had pulled his ferry to the north side of the river and left it grounded where the shallow pebble beach made a dry landing place for passengers even when the river was in flood. He picked up his basket and walked up the narrow trail to Norwottuck village, his dog Red—named in memory of his old English dog—following at his heels.

  He paused while he was still half a mile out and, self-consciously, cupped his hands to his mouth and made the “urr urr whoo hoo” call of the native owl, and waited till he heard the cry back. This was his permission to come to the village. He started on down the path and saw an old woman walking easily towards him. She must have been more than sixty but her hair, worn long on one side, was still black and her stride was confident. Only the deep wrinkles on her face and neck showed she was an elder of the village, a person of wisdom and experience.

  “Quiet Squirrel,” Ned said making a little nod to her. “Friend.”

  “Nippe Sannup,” she said pleasantly, in her own language. “Netop.”

  Ned struggled to reply in the native tongue. “Netop, Quiet Squirrel. Want candlewood, want sassafras,” he said. “Me come look-find?”

  She had to hide a smile at the big man talking like a child. “Take what you need from the forest,” she said generously. “And I have something to show you. I don’t know if you Coatmen like this?”

  She unbuttoned a satchel at her side and proffered a lump of rock. Ned took it from her hands, turned it over to examine it, and saw that the pebble had been cut in two and each half was hollow, but inside a tiny cave of diamonds sparkled with purple and blue crystals.

  He looked from the jagged gems to Quiet Squirrel’s face.

  “What this?” he asked.

  “Thunderstone,” she told him. “It protects from lightning strike.” When he frowned, uncomprehendingly, she raised her hands to the sky, and made a rumbling noise in her throat and then a “crick! crick!” noise. She brought her hands down, making a jagged gesture. “Lightning,” she told him. She lifted the stone above her head and smiled. “Safe. This is a thunderstone: it protects from thunderstorms.”

  Ned nodded. “Lightning! Safe—I understand.”

  He thought at once that this would be something his sister in London could sell to merchants whose high wooden roofs left them vulnerable to lightning strike, whose terror was fire, who had sworn their city must never burn again. She could sell it to the new builders in London who were putting up church spires with brass weathercocks, and bell towers with bronze bells. “You got lots?” he asked. “Many? Many?”

  She laughed at him, showing her teeth ground down from a diet of hard vegetable and grit. “Coatman!” she exclaimed. “You always want more. Show you one thing, you want a hundred.”

  Ruefully he spread his hands. “But I can sell this,” he admitted in English, and then tried her language again: “Trade. Good trade. You want wampum?”

  She shook her head. “Not wampum, not between you and me, not between friends.” She took his hand to try to explain to him. “Wampum is a sacred thing, Nippe Sannup. Wampum is a holy thing. You should give it as a gift, to one you love to show them that you value them. It’s not a coin. We should never have let your people use it for coin. It is not for sale. It shows love and respect. Respect is not for sale.”

  Ned grasped one word in ten of this but knew he had somehow offended. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Big feet—” He mimed trampling on her feelings. “Sorry. Big feet.”

  “What on earth are you doing now?” she asked him as he marched around the clearing trying to mime the idea of clumsiness. “You Coatmen are all quite mad.”

  Ned returned to her. “Sorry. You have more? This? Fair price?” He dipped his head. “Not wampum—not you to me wampum. We are friends.”

  She put her head on one side as if she were calculating. “I can get more,” she said. “But you will pay me in musket parts, and small iron rods.”

  Ned recognized the English word “muskets.” “Not guns,” he objected. “No guns. No thundersticks. Not for People of Dawnlands. Very bad!”

  “Not guns,” she agreed pleasantly. “But hammer, mainspring, frizzen.” She knew the English words for the parts of a musket, and showed him that she meant little parts of guns with her fingers.

  “Why?” Ned asked uneasily. “Why want? Why want parts of guns?”

  She smiled into his honest anxious face. “For hunting, of course,” she lied. “For hunting deer, Nippe Sannup. What else?”

  He was troubled. He did not have the words to ask her why she wanted parts to renovate muskets, if her people were arming, perhaps for a foray against another tribe which would disturb the balance of the whole region—English settlements as well as native peace treaties. “But all happy?” he asked, feeling like a fool under her steady dark gaze. “All good friends? Netop, yes? You like Coatmen?” He could not mask the note of pleading in his voice. “Friends with us? Us Englishmen? Friends with me?”

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  The front door closed behind James, and the two young women stood in silence to listen to the clatter of the horseshoes on the cobbles as he rode down the quay.

  “And where does he go? Sir James? Does he have a town house?” Livia asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t ask him? You don’t know if he stays at an inn or if he is so rich that he has a house of his own in London?”

  “No.”

  “I would ask him,” the younger woman asserted.

  “I’d prefer you don’t,” Alys said, her awkwardness making
her Sussex accent stronger. “He’s no friend to the family, he never was. You need not be more than…”

  “Polite?” Livia suggested with a little gleam. “Polite and cold? Like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, I will always be polite to your guests.”

  There was a little silence in the small, stuffy room.

  “And what do you do now?” Livia asked. “For the rest of the day? Do you, perhaps, walk out to look at shops? Do we go out to visit friends?”

  “No!” Alys exclaimed. “I work. I have goods coming in on the coastal trading ships, and I store them in the warehouse. I break them into smaller loads and send them to the London markets and shops and inns. I order the return load, and I pack the goods and send them out for their return journey. We trade along the coast, Kent and Sussex and Hampshire.”

  “No society?” Livia asked.

  “We are a working wharf,” Alys explained. “In the coastal trade. There’s no time for society.”

  “But why only the little ships?”

  “Sometimes we have big ships. But mostly they have to go to the legal quays to pay their taxes. Only the untaxed loads can come here. Sometimes, when the wait for the Excise officers is too long, the big ships will come here to declare their tax and unload. We’re called a sufferance wharf—we’re allowed to take the overspill from the legal quays. Some mornings I go to the coffeehouses to meet the captains and the shipowners and bid for their business.”

  “They are pleasant places? For ladies? Could I come with you?”

  Alys laughed at the thought of it. “No. You wouldn’t like it. They’re for business.”

  The younger woman widened her dark eyes and rested her lips against her baby’s head. “You are a workingwoman—what do you call yourself? A storeman?”

  “I’m a wharfinger.”

  “You do it all?”

  Alys flushed. “It’s how we live.”

  “Roberto told me that he was raised in the country, on the side of marshes that stretched to the sea and you never knew where the dry paths were and only people who lived there could find their way through the waters.”

  “That was more than twenty years ago,” Alys said unwillingly. “Rob was telling you of our childhood home. But, after the accident, we had to leave Foulmire and come here. At first, we worked for the woman that owned this quay, and we did her deliveries with our cart and horse, and then we were able to buy her out. Ma went out as a midwife to our neighbors, and made herbal teas and possets. She still has a good trade with the apothecaries and Uncle Ned sends us goods from New England, especially herbs.”

  “You don’t have a warehouse in the City? You don’t own a ship?”

  “This is all,” Alys confirmed.

  “But why does your husband not do all this work for you? Where is Mr. Stoney?”

  Alys flushed deeply. “Surely Rob told you? I’ve got no husband. I had to bear the twins and raise them on my own.”

  “Ah, I am so sorry. No, he didn’t tell me. I begin to think he was not honest with me. He made me think that you were a grander family by far, related to the Peachey family, and he was brought up with the lord’s son, a friend of the family.”

  Again, Alys shook her head, her mouth folded into a severe line. “No,” she said. “There’s no family anymore. Rob was just a companion to Sir William Peachey’s son; but only for one summer. Walter Peachey died years ago, his father too. Sir James Avery was their tutor. We’re not related to any lords, and we’re not friends with Sir James. And we never will be.” She hesitated, her face flamed red. “Maybe Rob was ashamed to tell you. Perhaps he was ashamed of us.”

  “But Sir James comes to see your mother this afternoon?” Livia pursued. “There must be a friendship here, an acquaintance?”

  “No,” Alys said flatly. “He’s coming just this once, and it makes no difference.”

  * * *

  As Alys went into her counting room, in the corner of the warehouse, and Alinor rested upstairs, Livia left the baby with the nursemaid, put on her hat, and walked out on the quayside where the incoming tide was running fast, slapping against the walls and sweeping away the rubbish upstream. Laborers fell back from her path with exaggerated respect, lounging sailors tipped their caps to her face and whistled behind her back. She ignored them all, walking through them as if she were deaf to the shouted suggestions and catcalls. She did not turn her head, she did not flush with embarrassment. Only once did she stop, when a tall broad man blocked her path and seized her hands.

  “Gi’ us a kiss,” he said, bending down and breathing a warm gust of beer into her face. To his surprise, instead of shrinking back she instantly gripped him tightly and pulled him closer, so that she could kick him, hard, just under the kneecap with her pointed shoe. He let out a yelp of surprise and pain and jumped back.

  “Vaffanculo!” she spat at him. “If you lay one finger on me, you’ll be sorry.”

  He bent and rubbed his knee. “God’s blood, missis… I just…”

  She turned her head and walked away before he could answer.

  “Oy! Oy!” came the shout from his mates. “No luck, Jonas?”

  He straightened up and made an obscene gesture, but he let Livia walk on, upriver. She turned inland from the quay along the little road that ran, potholed and muddy, behind the warehouses. She turned again, onto a cart track leading south, lined with small cottages with vegetable gardens. Behind them were green fields, and beyond them, a slow rise of green hills trimmed with darker hedges, capped with the soft billows of midsummer woods. Livia shaded her eyes and looked towards the horizon: nothing.

  Nothing.

  Livia, who had lived most of her life among the crowded squares and busy markets of Venice, saw nothing but emptiness: a waste of green, a few cows, a child watching them from the shade of an ash tree, and in the distance, the smoke from the chimney of an isolated farmhouse. Nothing.

  “Dio!” she said horrified. “What a place!”

  She gave a little “tut” of disapproval at the absence of activity, of shops, or diversion; she sighed irritably at the silence broken only by the cry of the seagulls over the river and the aspiring trill, high above her, of a lark. There was nothing here to give her any pleasure, and she turned her back on the fields, and went back the way she had come. The birds were singing in the hedges as she walked; she did not hear them.

  * * *

  “Where is she?” Alinor asked the maid who brought her some warm broth.

  “Walking.”

  “Where has she gone walking?” she asked Alys, who came in, still wearing her baize apron from the counting house, with an ink stain on her finger.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know she was out,” Alys said indifferently. “Perhaps she’s walked over Horsleydown.”

  “Wouldn’t she have taken the nursemaid? Wouldn’t she have taken the baby for fresh air?”

  “I don’t know,” Alys said again. “Ma, this afternoon…”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sure you want to see him? You don’t have to see him at all, of course. I can just tell him…”

  “What’s he coming for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For his child?”

  “He doesn’t have a child,” the younger woman replied stubbornly. “He’ll never learn it from me.”

  “Nor me,” Alinor promised, and when her daughter looked at her she smiled, with her old confidence. “Truly.”

  “He knew you were with child back then?”

  Alinor turned her head away.

  “Ma, did you tell him?”

  “He knew I was carrying his child; but he did not claim me, nor own it.”

  “He may claim you now,” Alys warned her; and was surprised by the luminous clarity of her mother’s smile as she raised her head.

  “Then he’s a bit late,” she said.

  * * *

  Livia returned from her walk just as Sir James stepped ashore from a li
ttle wherry boat at Horsleydown Stairs. Sir James paid his fare and climbed the greasy steps as she waited at the top. She smiled, as if surprised at their meeting, and gave him her hand. He bowed and kissed it.

  “You have been out?” he asked, glancing around at the wharf and the idle men who were openly staring.

  “I have to walk, for my health,” she said. “Behind these houses and these warehouses are some beautiful fields, so green! Rob always told me that England is so green all year round.”

  “You should not walk alone,” he said.

  “Who is there to walk with me?” she asked. “My sister-in-law works all day long, she has no time for me! And my mamma-in-law is delicate.”

  “Your maid,” he said. “Or their maid.”

  She gave a little giggle. “You have seen their maid?”

  She let the silence lengthen, until the thought came to him that he could walk with her.

  “Shall we go in?” he asked.

  “Of course!” she said. “Forgive me, I have forgotten my Italian manners in this rough place! Please come in.”

  She preceded him into the little hall and took off her bonnet, keeping on a little cap deliciously trimmed with black ribbons. She led the way into the parlor that overlooked the quayside and dropped the blinds on the noise and the heat with a sigh, as if they were unbearable. In the shaded room, she turned back to him. “May I offer you some tea? I suppose you want tea? Or do gentlemen take wine in the afternoon in England?”

  “Nothing, I thank you,” he said. “I am here to visit Mrs. Reekie. Would you be so kind as to ask the maid to tell her I am here?”

  “I will tell her myself,” she said sweetly. “She’s not the sort of maid who announces visitors. I had better do it. What business shall I say?”

  His grip on his hat tightened. “Nothing… nothing… Just… she will know.”

  “A personal matter?” she suggested helpfully.

  “Exactly so.”